


The Ruins of Tomorrow

by carxies



Series: Matsuhana [5]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mentions of Violence, Strangers to Enemies to Lovers, basically set in a world HEAVILY inspired by naruto, but you don't need any naruto knowledge to read this, death of unnamed minor characters, hints of PTSD, ninja au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-17 00:00:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29340951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carxies/pseuds/carxies
Summary: Takahiro grows up during the times of war. Along the line, he meets a boy who dreams of peace just like he does
Relationships: Hanamaki Takahiro/Matsukawa Issei, Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Series: Matsuhana [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/553141
Comments: 8
Kudos: 10





	1. PART ONE

**P A R T 1 – T O F I G H T**

Takahiro is a mid-range fighter.

He discovers this at the age of nine when he enrols in the academy as most kids do and the teachers test their abilities without any proper training.

The test reminds Takahiro of playground fighting when one kid brings a toy and doesn’t want to share. There are three stages to the test. They start standing two feet apart, then fifteen and then twenty-five. The instructions are simple, just like the rules of the playground are.

They are told to fight, however they can. Takahiro doesn’t understand the point, as the results are the same for every duo. One comes out a winner and the other a loser. He tells the boy he’s standing next to, Tooru, that much.

Tooru, light brown hair falling into his eyes, looks at Takahiro like he’s an idiot. Takahiro might be, but he also might not be. He isn't supposed to know this word, and yet he does. Idiot, his mother muttered once, when she forgot Takahiro was around. It meant stupid, she told him.

Takahiro isn't sure if he is stupid or not, but Tooru looks at him like he is.

“This isn't about who wins or loses,” Tooru says, mouth pulled down in a frown. His face isn't as round as Takahiro’s – he looks older, somehow. “They want to see if you fight from up close or from far away.”

Takahiro hums, doesn’t say anything else. He and Tooru wait for their turn to stand in the middle of the field in silence. When they fight, Tooru wins each time. He gets into Takahiro’s space before Takahiro can do anything, and he ends Takahiro’s misery with a single strike to his stomach.

Takahiro, as the loser who hasn’t gotten to show anything yet, is paired up with another kid. These fights drag on for much longer, as they both are unskilled. In the end, Takahiro is told he is a mid-range fighter, mostly likely.

Takahiro doesn’t really understand what all the distance talk is about, not yet, but he knows other things.

Ninja needs to be able to work with chakra, the strange energy flowing through their body. They need to learn hand seals, many of them. They need to bury their emotions, whatever that means. They put their village first, for whatever reason. His parents have taught him that much.

Both of them are apparently mid-range fighters as well, when they dress in black and mint to guard what Takahiro doesn’t understand. They tried to explain, as often as every night; a lecture instead of a bedtime story.

At the age of nine, Takahiro doesn’t understand yet, but he knows he is to become a mid-range fighter. That is something. It feels like something, at least.

-

Later, only much later, Takahiro learns that he doesn’t need to understand his purpose to fulfil his role – that is what his parents have been teaching him all along.

-

Takahiro attends academy as almost everyone. His grades, much like his skills, are perfectly average. So is the praise he receives for both. It is a pat on the head and a weak smile, all forgotten when he messes up the following day.

He makes friends – with geniuses and those who bore little to no talent both. It doesn’t really matter, how much they can or cannot do. It doesn’t matter whenever their families come from elite clans or are immigrants with no solid history to tell. In the academy, they are all taught the same things.

To fight, to defend, to sacrifice.

The village comes first, always.

Takahiro thinks that none of the kids understands. It makes the creeping suspicion of adults a little easier to bear in his still tiny chest. Adults are good for many things, but never answers. They demand and they take. What they give are only more questions. Takahiro thinks they all share one big secret – one that isn't meant for kids to hear – and they all discuss it after they put the kids to sleep.

“Does your mom or dad ever leave you home alone?” Tooru asks when Takahiro shares his concerns with him.

Tooru’s face is sceptical the way it is most of the time. It is too gloomy for the field during a lunch break, too knowing for a kid just like Takahiro is.

But Tooru isn't like the other kids, Takahiro learns at the beginning of their friendship. Tooru reads books that adults hide in the library and he talks to the teachers outside the academy, like they can be trusted. In the academy, Tooru only ever sits with Takahiro or Hajime, the third member of their self-made team. Tooru always looks a little out place here, and Takahiro cannot figure out why.

But if there is one kid that understands the adults, then it must be Tooru.

Takahiro frowns back at Tooru from where he’s leaning his back against a tree, the one that is said to be older than the village itself. He doesn’t remember his parents ever leaving him without adult supervision.

“No.”

“Ha!” Tooru exclaims. “Then when would all the adults talk about this big secret?”

“When we are asleep!” Takahiro raises his voices. He lowers it back down instantly when their teacher glares at him across the field. “The secret is real, I’m telling you.”

Tooru scoffs. He stuffs his cheeks with his packed lunch and chokes on his second too big bite. Takahiro has to slap his back to send the food flying out of his mouth. But even with tears gathering in his eyes, Tooru doesn’t look like any other kid in the academy.

Takahiro burns to know why.

“I never said it isn't real,” Tooru says once he wipes his face into his sleeve. “But they don’t talk about it when we are asleep. They must talk about it when we are here.”

Takahiro has never thought of that possibility. Of course, Tooru has.

“How do you know?”

“My parents don’t talk about any big secret during the night. They don’t talk much at all.”

Takahiro has more arguments to throw at Tooru, but the teacher chooses that moment to call them to gather around. They pack up their lunches, and Takahiro distantly misses Hajime, who would agree with Takahiro only to tease Tooru.

But Hajime hasn’t come to the academy that day. Funeral, Tooru had told him that morning. His dad, he whispered.

At the age of nine, Takahiro nods and he doesn’t ask any further. Together with Tooru and the rest of their classmates, they go back to training.

To fight, to defend, to sacrifice.

The village comes first, always.

-

That same night, Takahiro tries to stay up just in case his parents aren’t like Tooru’s. In case they talk about this big secret without him.

But his parents must be the same as Tooru’s after all. Maybe all adults grow up to be the same, when they abandon the joy Takahiro sees in kids but never in adults. He can’t think of an adult laughing the way kids on the playground do.

Takahiro’s parents don’t talk during the dinner and they don’t talk after it. They go to bed wordlessly, right after Takahiro’s door shuts closed. Only then Takahiro realises this is how they have always been, quiet in everything except for their displeasure.

But of course Tooru noticed it first.

-

“There used to be more adults around,” Tooru says one day, out of nowhere.

Neither Takahiro nor Hajime are good with words – not the way Tooru is.

Hajime is all action over idle talks, and Takahiro finds he likes that. Hajime doesn’t ask if help is needed but helps right away. He doesn’t ask if they should hang out but leads Takahiro and Tooru to the playground while Tooru munches on his bread.

Many words Takahiro knows come from Tooru, for Tooru has learnt them in the books that the adults allow him to read in his free time. It is no wonder that Tooru is the one doing most of the talking when they are together.

“What do you mean?” Takahiro asks, barely looking up from the sandcastle he and Hajime are building in the corner of the playground. It is meant to be a prison for the bugs Hajime has caught, but the structure keeps sinking under its own weight.

“I mean what I said,” Tooru says. He hands Hajime the plastic cup they use as their only tool besides their hands, now filled with damp sand. “There used to be more adults in the village. Young men and women. Most of them are gone now.”

Takahiro frowns, sits back on his heels. The village is filled with elderly and parents and kids, but that has never struck him as odd. Now, when he tries to recall an adult who doesn’t have kids, he cannot think of a single one.

“Gone where?” he asks.

“The war.”

Hajime drops the plastic cup, clenches his fists in his lap. The little they have managed to build collapses onto a pile of sand and rocks.

“The war,” Takahiro repeats.

“Yes.”

The word is one that Tooru has taught him not long ago, but its meaning is still abstract. The adults are off somewhere, fighting for the village. Keeping all of them safe. Fighting, defending, sacrificing. Putting their lives on the line for the village.

“When will they return?” Takahiro asks.

Hajime shoots him a glare, one that Takahiro knows but isn't used to receiving. He stands up, wipes his hands on his shorts, and crushes their failed prison under his slipper.

“Most of them won’t,” he says and leaves the playground before Takahiro or Tooru can react.

Tooru watches him go, his eyes sad as if the last bite of his favourite bread was taken from him.

Only then does Takahiro remember Hajime missing a day of the academy to attend a funeral. Hajime’s father had been at war.

-

At home, Takahiro isn't asked things often, but when he is, the topic doesn’t vary. All his parents care about is his progress in the academy and his classmates. What are they like? Not their favourite toys, are they any good?

Can they fight?

“There’s a boy in my class who can’t do ninjutsu or genjutsu,” Takahiro tells them one afternoon when he cannot think of anything else to offer them. Like they have run out of things to say to him, he has run out of things to say to them. “Tooru, my friend.”

His father nods. He doesn’t bother to look at Takahiro. He doesn’t move an inch in his old armchair. He used to be unstoppable, always in rush to do something. He wouldn’t stay still even if Takahiro’s mother would yell at him for his restlessness. That was a long time ago, Takahiro realises. Now his father shows any sign of life only when he is called to the village leader, when he has to put on black and mint.

“Can he fight?”

“Yeah,” Takahiro says. “He’s the best in taijutsu. In our class, but in the academy too. The teachers always praise him when we train because no one can beat him.”

His father nods. “Then it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t have a talent for anything else. He will be useful in times like these.”

Takahiro frowns. “What do you mean?”

But his father is no longer talking to him when he says, to himself or the wall, “He will be sent out first. They always need more people at the front line.”

Takahiro doesn’t ask again.

-

They all turn ten, Takahiro and his classmates one by one. Along with the birthday wishes, it is decided that playing should no longer be the focus of their free time, for they are academy students to become ninjas one day.

Tooru and Hajime accept this development naturally, seemingly without the dread that Takahiro cannot shake off.

“I just don’t get why we need to train outside academy too,” Takahiro says.

Both Tooru and Hajime frown at him. They usually stick together these days, except for the two weeks when Hajime was sick and was forced to stay in bed. He missed the lectures and the training, but he doesn’t seem behind. Not at all. After Tooru, he ranks as the second most skilled students of their year. Like Tooru, he beats Takahiro each time they fight.

Today, Hajime and Tooru are exercising together.

Takahiro watches them from a swing, where he does nothing except thinking. That must count for something too.

“Obviously the more we train, the better we get,” Tooru says.

Hajime nods, doesn’t pause his now usual sit-ups. He is yet to start sweating, despite the annoying exercise. For muscles and stamina, Hajime told Takahiro once.

Takahiro thinks there isn't a single muscle in his own body, although that sounds absurd. He doesn’t know how muscles are supposed to work, but he doesn’t believe that knowledge would enlighten him in any way. The kind of knowledge he craves is hidden in the books even Tooru isn't allowed to read, those books which are placed high in the library bookcases and only adults can borrow.

“But what about those who are already great? Who get good eyes or some secret jutsu passed on thanks to their family? Do they train?”

“They do,” Hajime says. “And we train to catch up with them.”

Takahiro doesn’t understand why he’s the one answering, as Hajime usually doesn’t speak unless completely necessary, until he takes a look at Tooru’s face. It is twisted with an emotion Takahiro doesn’t know; another mystery to solve. A reason why Tooru is different from all the other kids, maybe.

“Yeah, but they will always be better than us,” Takahiro says.

Tooru jumps to his feet and he doesn’t even look at Takahiro as he storms off. Hajime rushes after him, and he doesn’t say a word either. They are close to Takahiro, but always closer to each other.

And Takahiro still has so much yet to understand about them both.

-

Takahiro graduates as everyone else. Neither at the top or the bottom of his class, just in the middle. It doesn’t matter. At the end of their two years-long training, they are all given a forehead protector to say they are now ninja. They are genins, the lowest rank of the ninja system and all the village needs to employ them.

There is always a shortage of soldiers, his father says. Especially in times like these.

Takahiro has stopped expecting answers from him. He has stopped asking for them, as it was a waste of time and breath. His parents would never tell him anything useful. They don’t ever talk.

By the time Takahiro ties the bandana over his forehead, his parents no longer dress in black and mint. They have exchanged their uniforms for plain clothing, their blades for empty eyes and their youth for aged, long faces that demand silence at all times.

Sometimes, however, Takahiro’s father groans about an old injury. Takahiro nods in sympathy as if he understands what pain, besides fighting Tooru and Hajime on the playground, is.

He does not.

-

Tooru wears his protector around his bicep, wrapped three times around his lanky arm to fit. He is now taller than Takahiro and Hajime, and his pants don’t reach to cover his ankles. He and Hajime, a perfect duo in their strange synchronization, get assigned to the same team.

Takahiro has always imagined the three of them being together, as a team formed on the first day of their training. It was always the three of them, Takahiro thought. But when he truly looks back, he sees how mistaken he has been. It has always been them, Tooru and Hajime, and then Takahiro running after them.

It stings. It aches in a way Takahiro hasn’t experienced yet.

“This doesn’t mean we won’t be friends anymore,” Tooru tells him. “We just wouldn’t make a good team now.”

“How come?”

Tooru taps his bottom lip like he’s looking for the easiest words he knows. To explain this as simply as possible.

Takahiro feels like an idiot then, just as he did when he first met Tooru outside the academy.

“Our power as a team wouldn’t be balanced,” Tooru says at last. “They always put someone really strong, someone weak and someone average together. Hajime is strong, but we are both average at best. Compared to him, we are both weak. We would only be dragging him down.”

“You are not weak,” Takahiro tells Tooru. “You can beat anyone in taijutsu.”

Tooru shrugs. The bandana slips down his arm and he hastily pulls it back up, tightens the knot. For someone who exercises with Hajime most of the days, he can’t seem to put on the same muscle Hajime does.

“That isn't enough. Not yet.”

“It will be?”

“One day, yeah. I will make it,” Tooru says. “So stick with your team and make it with me.”

-

Takahiro’s team is the quiet girl from their class and the boy who always asked annoying questions in class to look smarter than he probably was. Their team leader is a man who seems too young to be a true adult, but his rank is probably more important than his age.

During their first year of being genins, they all get the stupidest missions to complete. They help out in stores and search for lost items and baby-sit. They clean the village and they help repair buildings; everything the adults apparently don’t have time for.

-

Takahiro’s team leader gets called to the front line only after a few months into completing their stupid missions. He says his goodbye like he doesn’t expect to return, and Takahiro remembers Hajime’s father then.

-

On their way from Tooru’s house, Takahiro and Hajime pass by the playground. The place seems sacred, somehow, for they both hesitate before they step onto the sand. In the evening hour, the playground is empty save for them, and they sit on the swings like they haven’t in a while. The two of them don’t hang out without Tooru often, if ever.

Takahiro has just turned twelve, but his presence on the playground feels wrong, like he is too old to be sitting where kids without a worry in the world do.

“Do you think they will send us to the war too?” Takahiro asks. Hajime now is more open to the topic of war, as time healed the worst of his wound.

Hajime kicks the sand under his feet, digs his heel in. “They will,” he says. “But I don’t know when.”

“I think the adults are raising us like they raise animals. Train us and brainwash us until we are too old to question it. Then they will send us off too.”

Hajime frowns, but he doesn’t outright disagree.

-

From his first real mission, thirteen years old Takahiro returns to the village without his teammates but with the scroll they were supposed to retrieve.

“You could have died as well,” the medic treating him in the hospital tells him. The woman cannot be older than their former teacher, barely twenty, but under the harsh light, she looks ancient. Worn out, the way his parents are. Aged by not years but terrors of the world. “Be grateful. You will be able to form seals just fine.”

Takahiro nods, watching his now unbalanced left hand getting wrapped in clean bandages. After the two days it took Takahiro to return to the village, he wound no longer hurts. The sensation is strange still. If this is the ache his father talks about, Takahiro doesn’t know. A lost pinkie finger feels like a too insignificant injury to compare to the aches of his father.

How silly, not even worthy of mentioning.

His teammates lost their lives – a pinkie finger is nothing to dwell on.

Takahiro is grateful, really. Grateful for his cowardness. He is grateful he was the average one of his team – the weak one was targeted and brought down first. He couldn’t help. He only got in the way, lost his finger and couldn’t bear the little pain.

He is grateful, of course. Being average allowed him to slip past the enemy while they focused on the strong one next. How grateful he is that he had just enough time to take the scroll and run, careful not to leave a bloody trail behind as he hid and waited.

The enemy didn’t follow. They didn’t even want the scroll. They wanted blood and they got it. When Takahiro returned to the scene later, so much later, too late, the enemy was long gone.

The medic finishes her work. She gathers the scraps of fabric Takahiro used for bandages after he crawled out of his hiding, ready to throw them away.

Takahiro tugs at her sleeve before she can. “Leave them, please.”

She does.

The scraps are filthy, blood and mud and sweat-soaked in. When Takahiro cut them off his dead teammate’s uniforms, he picked the cleanest parts. His own clothes were beyond saving thanks to the ditch he had hidden in. Theirs could still help – they died too quickly for their uniforms to carry the signs of a fight.

Why Takahiro took a piece from each of them, he doesn’t know.

He didn’t look at them while he was cutting the fabric. He didn’t look at them before he set off back to the village, head dizzy and left hand throbbing. He couldn’t do what the academy once taught them.

Get rid of any evidence. Don’t leave a body behind.

The enemy didn’t have any use for them, however. Nor for their basic skills, not even those perfected yet. They were kids like Takahiro – not special.

Maybe adults would go and bring them back to their grieving families. If adults feel grief, at least.

The scraps of fabric are now beyond filthy, but they are the only reminder of Takahiro’s team. His first team.

Eyes watery with regret, he tears them apart until he can pull a long loose thread from each. One black, one mint. He wraps those two threads around his right pinkie finger, ties them under the first knuckle. Not loose enough to slip down, not tight enough to cut the circulation of blood. Just enough to remember them always.

In the empty hospital room, Takahiro weeps as he will never again. For the first time ever, he thinks it is better not to understand anything. Not adults and not war. Not the system created ages ago. Not what exactly they are supposed to do, kids with knives in their still shaky hands.

Takahiro is sure the damn scroll isn't worth two lives, even as he hands it over and receives praise for his accomplished mission. The higher-ups offer their hollow condolences, their faces unchanging when they hear the story of two kids paying for a piece of paper with their lives.

They approve of Takahiro’s memory when it comes to remembering those cursed words. To fight, to defend, to sacrifice. The village comes first, always.

Takahiro feels like spitting into their old faces. They leave before he can do so and risk banishment. The cruelty of adults doesn’t know any lines, Takahiro learns at the age of thirteen.

-

Tooru sits beside Takahiro’s bed, peeling an apple he has brought. His individual features are calm, but his expression as a whole is strange. Stranger than usual. He told Takahiro a joke the first thing upon his arrival, but Takahiro didn’t laugh.

Takahiro doesn’t feel like laughing even two hours into Tooru’s visit. He sits with his back leaned against the wall and watches Tooru’s fingers work, careful and yet sure around the sharp knife. Tooru was always the best with knives, back at the academy. He would sometimes come close to beating even their teacher, and he would receive the praise that he never accepted.

The only person who could beat Tooru in physical combat was Hajime, but for a reason Takahiro doesn’t understand, Hajime always lets Tooru win in the last second. If Tooru has noticed, he has never said a thing. Not in front of Takahiro, at least.

Tooru hands Takahiro the plate with the neat apple slices. Takahiro eats them only because it gives him something to do in the silence he isn't used to, not around Tooru.

“When can you leave?” Tooru asks, like it matters, when Takahiro chews the last slice.

Takahiro now has no team – no way of being assigned new missions. All he can do is sit around and complain about the ache of his left hand, the way adults do. He can think about them and their big secret, still a mystery to him.

“Tomorrow,” Takahiro says. “It seems to be healing fine.”

Tooru nods, nothing else to add. These days, he talks the most when Hajime is around.

“Train with me,” Takahiro says after another long moment of silence.

Tooru nods, but his expression stays strange until he leaves Takahiro’s hospital room. When the light hits his face just right as he’s saying his goodbye, he looks like one of them – the adults.

They both do, Takahiro realises when he catches his reflection later.

-

The day after Takahiro is deemed fit to return to his usual activities, Tooru leads him down path Takahiro doesn’t know.

They walk through the forest wrapping around the village like a cloak without a word spoken between them, carrying the strange atmosphere of the hospital room with them. The path is nothing more than a line of withering flowers, bent for they have been stepped on in the past. One might mistake it for a trail of an animal, but Tooru’s steps are as sure as ever.

Takahiro follows his friend, his oldest friend, and he cannot find a way to dissolve the tension they had created the other day. He promised Tooru not to ask about where they were going, but the unfamiliar trees looming over them only unsettle him further. His right hand hangs by his side a little heavier than the left one, but Takahiro suspects the disbalance has little to do with the loss of his pinkie. It must be the two strings dipped in death that weight him down.

No one seems to notice them, strangely enough. They scream for Takahiro’s attention every second of the day, so obviously out of place that he cannot imagine overlooking them as others do. But no one asks about two strings a boy has tied around his finger. They match his uniform well enough, for they could have been taken out of it instead of another, and what is an odd accessory when everyone has one?

Takahiro would swear the strings bleed, sometimes, when he’s washing his hands long enough to give in the urge to fixate on them. Then they bleed as their owners bled, silently while Takahiro does nothing.

No one seems to notice the strings – not even the one person Takahiro knows not to miss a thing.

After at least an hour of walking, they step out of the forest to arrive on a shore of a river wider than the one Takahiro is used to crossing in the village. Takahiro listens to their surroundings, the cheery song of the birds and the calm hum of the river. He cannot hear any human voices, the rush of the village.

With a startle, he realises they are outside; truly outside, past the village’s high walls and the barrier hiding it from the rest of the world. It should be impossible to leave the village without the permission of the higher-ups. It should be impossible to leave the village any other way than through the big gate which the adults guard at all times.

When Takahiro turns to Tooru to demand an explanation, the answer is already slipping past Tooru’s lips.

“I found a way out when I was looking for a spot to train,” he says. “I needed a place where the others couldn’t mock me. It must be a hole in the barrier.”

Takahiro nods. According to all the academy has taught them, Tooru should have informed the higher-ups immediately upon his discovery. If he did, they would have fixed the barrier. Takahiro asks anyway.

“Does anyone else know?” 

“Hajime. And now you.”

Of course, Takahiro wants to say, poison on his tongue, but he doesn’t. They are no adults, and yet there are already matters they don’t speak of – Tooru’s lack of natural ability and Takahiro’s ghosts of parents. Hajime’s mother. The pull between Tooru and Hajime, the bond that belongs to them only.

Soon, Takahiro thinks, they will be just the adults after all. They will keep secrets that no one dares to voice and overlook all that they used to question. They will repeat those cursed words like their parents do – or did when they were still human enough to speak – and they will no longer search for the truth. They will no longer care for good and bad, for the village will become the only answer to all the questions.

Takahiro drops onto the ground, hard and rough, and digs a stone out of its muddy bed. He tosses it up in the air a few times, and then he throws it into the river with all the might he manages to find in himself.

Tooru mimics him, but his rock flies farther and disappears under the surface of the river with a splash much bigger.

“What is it like?” Tooru asks.

He asks but he doesn’t voice the question like he would a year, two ago. He is not as direct in his curiosity as he used to be. Then again, neither is Takahiro.

Then again, they are no longer speaking of some big secret that adults keep from them. Death, if anything in the world at all, is real.

“I barely remember,” Takahiro tells him. It’s the lie he prepared for everyone who asked, but Tooru is the first one to care, as he always is. He is the only one who ever cares, it seems. “It happened so fast.”

Tooru hums like he understands, and for a moment, Takahiro believes he does. But Tooru is yet to see blood that isn't his own spilled. He is yet to hear the last breath of someone, to see their body drop cold and unmoving. Tooru cannot understand death for he is yet to witness it.

Takahiro wishes he never has to, but even he knows it’s a wish of a fool. This isn't a matter of if but of when.

“Won’t you tell me I’m a coward?” Takahiro asks.

Tooru doesn’t tear his eyes away from the clear water of the river, but he shakes his head. “It might be cowardness that has saved your life, but I will not call you a coward for surviving.”

At that moment, Takahiro understands Tooru more than he ever has, and more than he ever will. He almost tells Tooru right then, but he stops himself before any stupid words can leave his mouth.

They don’t speak after. Takahiro does his best to keep up with Tooru’s movements, to copy them, but he ends up on the hard ground each time. Again, he tells Tooru, and Tooru nods, fights him again to beat him once more.

Bruised and out of breath, Takahiro follows Tooru back to the village, rushing to arrive before the sun sets and shadows fall onto the barely visible path.

When the familiar trees and buildings greet Takahiro upon entering the circle of the barrier, they feel less welcoming than ever. Instead of offering a sense of protection, they weight down on Takahiro like the bars of a cage.

After that afternoon, the village never feels like a home again.

-

Hajime attends the second funeral in his life only four years after the first one. This time, he asks both Takahiro and Tooru to come. While Hajime stands surrounded by the adults in black, keeping his face as composed as theirs, Takahiro and Tooru linger by the edge of the small crowd.

No one seems to be crying, Takahiro notes with a sharp pang of pain somewhere deep in his chest. The adults do not weep the way he wept for his teammates, although he would call them barely friends. They did not get along as well as Takahiro would have liked, but they shared meals and they shared stories over the fire outside the village’s walls. They were a team, just as Hajime’s father and mother had their own teams.

And yet no one, not even Hajime himself, cries for the woman lost on a mission for the village’s sake. The words the adults speak were as hollow as they are, just a necessity of tradition they no longer keep in their hearts.

Takahiro feels like screaming at the top of his lungs then. He feels like screaming for Hajime’s mother and for Hajime, who is expected to carry on as if this was nothing but a simple rock on his path. But Hajime is only thirteen. He, Tooru and Takahiro are – they all are just kids in the adult world, kids with adult weapons and adult ideas forced down their throats.

Hand trembling, Takahiro blindly reaches for Tooru, but it is Tooru who finds him first. They hold onto each other’s sleeves as the adults go on, praising Hajime’s mother’s skills and achievements which mean nothing for she has left her only child behind.

Tooru tugs at Takahiro’s sleeve, and Takahiro dares to look at him then. In the end, Tooru, always the one out of place, always the strange one, is the only person to cry for Hajime’s mother at her funeral.

-

Day after day, Takahiro returns to the clearing past the village’s walls. Some days, Tooru comes with him, but those days slowly fade into a rare occasion, as Tooru’s team is busy with completing missions.

Takahiro trains the best he can on his own. He mimics what he can remember of Hajime’s exercises and Tooru’s stretches, tries to repeat what the teachers in the academy have once shown them. The process is as slow as ever, but three months of doing nothing but bettering himself shows its results at last. Takahiro no longer gasps for air while walking the distance to the river and the journey no longer takes him over an hour.

Those few times he gets to fight Tooru on his free day, he doesn’t win, but he lasts longer. He avoids a few hits he couldn’t before, and on good days, he even lands a hit or two of his own.

He is not bad for a mid-range fighter, Tooru tells him. He will be able to hold his ground if he cannot keep his distance, Tooru tells him.

And Takahiro nods, but he isn't sure he will ever fight anyone other than Tooru. He isn't sure if he wants to.

He isn't sure if the life picked for him is the path he should walk, although it had been walked by his parents before him.

Still, he trains outside the village, where he belongs to no one but himself. He doesn’t bring his forehead protector with him, and he doesn’t miss its weight or press against his skin. He doesn’t miss what it symbolizes.

Still, he doesn’t understand a damn thing.

-

The fourteenth year of Takahiro’s life brings many great changes with it, but the most important one, the one that Takahiro keeps to himself only, is the black-haired boy he meets at the river on an early summer day.

The strange is sitting on the other side of the river when Takahiro emerges from the forest. He is quick to jump to his feet, quicker than even Tooru. Takahiro’s eyes barely keep up with his movements, but he doesn’t miss the way the boy reaches to his side. It a move as familiar as breathing. It is the only sign Takahiro needs to know he shouldn’t be talking to his boy.

He does so anyway, unable to help the curiosity he has spent years burying deep in his chest.

As he slowly walks further down the shore, he raises his empty hands in the air to signal purely peaceful intentions. He stops inches away from the water and waits for the stranger to move.

The boy’s eyes follow each of Takahiro’s movements carefully, his stance defensive for a long while. When he finally relaxes, the tension seeps out of his slowly, in waves. He takes a step, two forward, and then he’s standing on the surface of the river, the water flowing under his feet undisturbed.

It is a second sign that Takahiro should turn and leave, run even, for this boy must be more skilled than he is. Takahiro has never been great at controlling his chakra with such precision to bend the laws of nature to his will.

“I would meet you in the middle, but I can’t walk on water,” Takahiro calls. He doesn’t recognize his voice, pitched with excitement the academy should have beaten out of him.

The river carries his words to the stranger, and he receives them with a blank expression. He considers Takahiro’s statement as he takes cautious steps across the river, and Takahiro uses that time to watch him in all of his glory.

The short black hair curls on his head, around his ears and on his forehead, but it doesn’t reach low enough to even touch his eyebrows. If Takahiro didn’t see him move faster than a flash just a minute ago, he would think he has woken the boy from his slumber. His gaze is lazy if not sleepy when he stops a mere foot away from Takahiro, taller and wider in shoulders. He is yet to speak or to show any emotion.

“Teach me how to do that,” Takahiro says, fed up with being measured as a threat when he is capable of hurting himself only.

A beat of tense silence follows his words, and then the boy’s lips curl into an amused smile ever so slowly. He takes another step forward, and this time, he must be dragging Takahiro’s attention to their height difference on purpose.

“What do you offer in return for my service?” he asks, his voice as deep as Hajime’s has turned just that summer. Definitely deeper than Takahiro’s own, much to his jealousy.

“Isn't the promise of my company a payment appealing enough?” Takahiro asks back, challenging the confidence he has been stealing from his friends for years now.

The boy looks him up and down, and for a moment Takahiro doubts his primary judgement of them being about the same age. He doesn’t have time to ponder the matter for long, however, because the boy speaks up again.

“Appealing maybe, but is it profitable as well?”

“That depends on you alone.”

“How do I know you will not use what I teach you against me?”

“You don’t,” Takahiro answers, sobering as he tastes the bitterness the truth leaves on his tongue.

These are uncertain times, his father says these days. We cannot trust the other villages, his mother repeats instead of greetings these days.

The boy’s smile falls, straightens itself into a tight line. It only further highlights his hooded eyes, as dark as his hair. From up close, however, Takahiro catches his mistake. From up close, the boy’s eyes are sharp on Takahiro, and the sensation of being watched with such intensity reminds Takahiro of his first meeting with Tooru.

“Then teach me something in return,” the boy says. “The next time.”

“The next time?”

“Whenever that might be,” the boy says.

He is gone in a flash, out of Takahiro’s sight before Takahiro can even register him moving. Was it not for the burning of his ears, he would write the boy off as an odd daydream.

That day, Takahiro sits by the river, feet dipped in the freezing water, and wastes his afternoon away, thinking of the boy whose name he didn’t get to ask for.

-

Their parents, Takahiro’s and Tooru’s and all the parents of the older kids who once wore black and mint, get called to the war. They are offered the chance to decline, but Takahiro knows the offer is formal, empty thing. Taking it would only bring the greatest shame upon a family.

In the middle of July of Takahiro’s fourteenth year, his parents swear their loyalty once more.

Takahiro stands in the door of their bedroom while they dig out their knives and seals, put on the mint vests Takahiro once dreamed of wearing. Their movements are sluggish with both age and distaste, for they folded their uniforms a long time ago. Their faces fail to show any hint of pride.

The words of his father ring in Takahiro’s ears louder than ever, uglier than he remembers them. His father, for all his faults, only ever spoke of things given, unchangeable. It was Takahiro who tainted his facts with bitterness.

They always need more people on the front lines.

Especially in times like these.

Takahiro cannot recall the last time his parents have laughed, smiled even. The fate now threatens to make this image, of them aged and soulless, the last memory Takahiro might have. They will march into a war that isn't theirs, and Takahiro will stay behind with nothing but a piece of metal on a bandana and two strings still tied around his finger.

It is then when he first thinks that cursed thought. At fourteen, the thought is still only that, abstract and gone as fast as it has come. At fourteen, Takahiro doesn’t think of the means or consequences. Not yet. It is at the age of fourteen, however, when the seed burrows itself deep down in Takahiro’s mind, and it only grows.

The tears Takahiro has expected never come. Not when he nods at the instructions his parents give him, not when they say their hollow goodbye.

Takahiro storms through the empty streets of the village until he finds himself standing at Tooru’s doorstep, a little breathless but still free of any visible sorrow. He is acting exactly the way the academy has taught them. Never has he hated the black and mint more than in that moment, hysteria bubbling in his throat.

Tooru opens the door teary-eyed, and Takahiro nearly flinches at the sharp pain under his ribs. He thinks his own tears might come then, assured by Tooru’s emotion, but he waits for them in vain. The cage he has built within himself is too strong for even him to break. He doesn’t recall where he has lost the key, either.

“They are gone,” Takahiro says when the silence between them stretches too thin. His voice sounds more final than the words should be, but Takahiro is no stranger to a loss that is expected.

Tooru shakes his head, mouth set in a tight line that Takahiro will later recognize as proud. He stares at Takahiro with a strange wonder behind his gaze, as if his tears do nothing to cloud his vision.

“They are gone, Tooru,” Takahiro says. “Because of a stupid war.”

Tooru shakes his head again, firmer. For the first time in the years they have known each other, Takahiro realises Tooru doesn’t understand him just as he doesn’t understand Tooru.

“They are gone!”

The tears Tooru has kept at bay begin to fall freely down his cheeks, but his stare doesn’t waver. His mouth doesn’t tremble, for Tooru has always been strong in his belief, no matter the emotions he couldn’t control.

“They left to protect the village,” Tooru says. “To protect us all, those who cannot protect themselves. They will come back.”

“Did Hajime’s parents come back? They didn’t even have bodies to bury!”

Tooru recoils back, out of Takahiro’s reach as if Takahiro has hit him. His eyes speak of betrayal Takahiro cannot bring himself to acknowledge in his fury, but when he opens his mouth, his words betray him as well.

Takahiro remembers how young Tooru is then; how young they both are. Tooru is yet to lose someone the way Takahiro and Hajime have. Tooru is yet to taste the bitterness of the death. Takahiro has always known he couldn’t protect Tooru from the ugliness of the world, but he has hoped. He has hoped that out them all, kids with knives in their trembling hands, Tooru would make it into the adulthood without the inevitable loss.

It has been a childish dream.

Takahiro turns his back at Tooru, doesn’t look back. He sucks in a deep breath and much like a madman, he runs down the stairs.

-

His feet lead him to the forest. He walks the path dazed, lulled into fragile calmness by the hum of the old trees. He steps onto the shore of the river with mind empty safe for the need to rest, to close his eyes and forget the world. He doesn’t allow himself the rest just yet.

Instead, he sits on the ground and throws rocks in the water well past nightfall. Head heavy, he falls asleep under the stars, no care for the threat of danger lurking in the woods. If the woods have wanted him dead, then he would have been long dead by now.

-

When he wakes the following morning, muscles sore and skin cold, a familiar face is leering down at him, smile small but brighter than the sun itself.

Takahiro, in both his sleepiness and sorrow, doesn’t startle. He gazes up at the black-haired boy with nothing but wonder in his heart, the one knife he carries with himself forgotten in his pocket.

Surprised by the lack of reaction, the boy leans further down, his nose barely inches away from Takahiro’s own. His eyes, hidden in the shadow, seem even darker than Takahiro remembers them to be. The spark in them, however, is beyond obvious even to Takahiro’s sleep clouded stare. If all of Takahiro’s dreams looked like this, then perhaps he wouldn’t dread putting his head to rest every night.

Takahiro reaches out without a second thought. He means to confirm the boy before him is real, probably, but the boy catches Takahiro’s wrist before his fingers can come to contact with the boy’s cheek. Takahiro has years and years of training ahead of him if he dreams of his body ever reacting this fast.

“I’m not interested in fighting,” Takahiro says once he’s sure his voice won’t fail him the way his body did. It is no apology and it is no excuse, but it is the barest truth Takahiro can offer to anyone.

The boy doesn’t release his arm just yet, brows pulled together in thought. If he wished, he could end Takahiro in a million ways before Takahiro as much as drew in another breath. The realisation doesn’t scare Takahiro, and that’s a third sign he should never return to the river he called home again.

“I’m not interested in fighting either,” the boy says at last.

He pulls Takahiro up to his feet. As they stand chest to chest, he loosens his grip on Takahiro’s arm just enough for Takahiro to slip free, but against his better judgement, Takahiro lingers. The boy humours him for a moment longer and then he jerks his hand back to his side.

“Are you interested in keeping your word?” Takahiro asks, though he has not been promised anything. The boy was as careful with his words as Tooru is, if not more. 

The stranger rolls his eyes, but his still boyishly round face gives no signs of real annoyance.

“I suppose I can waste one afternoon on a lost cause.”

“How do you know I’m a lost cause?”

“I can tell.”

-

Looking back, Takahiro was a lost cause from that first summer day.

Looking back, Takahiro should have run that second morning, for he would later learn the boy’s name and mind, his lips and his hands like his own. He would learn all of his secrets and offer his own in return, a trade fairer than anything else in the world they hid from.

Takahiro is a mid-range fighter. It is no wonder he would fall under an attack from up close.


	2. PART TWO

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takahiro continues to grow alongside his friends

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Drinking game! Drink each time:
> 
> -I use passive for the impact  
> -Two or more sentences/paragraphs after each other start with the letter T  
> -You notice Makki having a crush on his friends (Oikawa especially 'cause same)  
> -Someone nods

**P A R T 2** **– T O D E F E N D**

Left to spend their summer days alone, the three of them – Tooru, Hajime and Takahiro – slowly drift closer in the small space of Hajime’s apartment. 

The adults have help Hajime move after his mother’s passing, their old house big enough for the ghosts of the past to linger in each and every corner. Takahiro doesn’t know the details, for he has never dared to ask, but Hajime’s childhood home has been sold to another family. The few times Takahiro has passed by, they have not seemed haunted. 

The ghosts have followed Hajime. They took residence in his shadow and his eyes, ever-present in each of his movements. Just as Takahiro walks leaning to the right side, weighed down by two worn-out strings, Hajime looks right through people, sometimes. Takahiro wishes there was an easy way to share the burden on their shoulders, but he hasn’t found one yet. 

And so, neither he nor Hajime speak of what they cannot voice. 

Hajime’s apartment only has two rooms; a bedroom and a kitchen that stretches into a living room if you close one eye. It is situated on the very top floor of a newer building on the outskirts of the village. From the balcony, just barely a meter of space, one can see the forest surrounding the village, hiding its walls.

In a desperate need of normality, Tooru and Takahiro spend the night as soon as Hajime unpacks the last of his boxes. 

They sit on the floor in the living room and they play card games long past their bedtimes. That night, they share only few words of any depth. They fall asleep in the living room too, Tooru and Hajime at least. 

Takahiro retreats to the balcony, steps as silent as he can manage, and sinks onto the cold stone. He watches the crowns of the trees bathing in the moonlight for long hours. As the first sun rays peek from between the clouds, catching on the branches, Tooru joins him. 

“Will he be okay?” he asks Takahiro, as if Takahiro ever had any answers.

Somewhere far away, far behind the trees and the river, their parents are rising to the battle, if they are still able to. Meanwhile, Hajime’s parents lie under the ground, just as Takahiro’s teammates do. Meanwhile, Takahiro and Tooru sit on the balcony, still in their pyjamas, allowed such luxury. 

“I don’t know,” Takahiro tells him honestly.

Tooru nods. For a brief moment, he looks like the kid Takahiro has met outside the academy. Wide-eyed, so full of wonder and promise the other kids, Takahiro included, lacked. Tooru has always seemed out of place, in the academy and on the playground. Even now, it is clear he doesn’t belong by Takahiro’s side. 

“Have you ever been okay again?” Tooru asks, and the regret in his voice is thick enough to startle Takahiro. When he looks at Tooru, looks at him properly for the first time in months, Tooru’s eyes are filled with tears. “I never asked you, back then.”

The truth is, Takahiro realises, that he has always wanted someone to ask. He has wanted his parents to ask, and he has wanted the high-ups to ask. He has wanted, out of everyone, Tooru to ask. He has wanted someone to pity him; a child who has witnessed death on his very first mission. But back then, Tooru was only a child as well.

“I don’t know,” Takahiro answers, truthfully. “I don’t know.”

Tooru weeps then.

-

After spending that first night at Hajime’s, the sleepovers become a regular occurrence. Tooru or Takahiro forget a t-shirt once and a pair of socks next, leave a toothbrush in the bathroom and kick their pyjama bottoms under Hajime’s shelves. 

By the beginning of August, they return to their own houses only when they think of something to bring over to Hajime’s. Their futons stay sprawled in Hajime’s living room and their favourite noodles are always to be found in the kitchen. In the bathroom, their toothbrushes sit in one cup. 

They don’t talk the way they used to, when they were kids who knew nothing of the war, but the silent company makes the dread growing in Takahiro’s gut a little easier to bear. 

-

By the beginning of August, the plants Takahiro’s mother has once cared for have all died. They make for a sad sight, sitting by the windows in the pile of their own yellow leaves. Takahiro doesn’t hold himself responsible – he suspects they have dried out long before he packed his bag and locked the door behind him. 

-

Tooru and Hajime still leave to complete missions outside the village walls, sometimes, and those are the days when Takahiro returns to the river. Those are the days when Takahiro returns home.

-

The summer breeze ruffles Takahiro’s now too long hair. It tickles his ears and the itch threatens to throw his concertation off. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Takahiro shuts his eyes closed. 

He listens to the calm hum of the river running under his feet, focuses on nothing but its suppressed energy. When he really tries, he can hear its whispers. If heavy rains were to come, the river would spill on the shore. It would take a few of the closest trees down and head for the village next, for water has always been the deadliest element despite its seemingly peaceful nature. 

The wind picks up. 

Takahiro’s hair tickles the top of his left ear and unthinking, he reaches out to scratch the spot. He loses his footing that moment. The chakra he has just barely managed to concentrate into his feet dissolves. 

Before he can hold his breath, the water pulls him down under. 

The river isn't all that deep, but Takahiro is not all that tall either. When he sinks to the bottom, he sinks wholly. Each time he falls, he believes it might be the last time, but the water disagrees. What stops his heartbeat for a mere second isn't fear but the suddenness of the fall, the coldness of the water embracing him. 

The river means him no harm.

Takahiro flaps his arms, still unused to the movement, and emerges above the surface with no swimming skill. He floats in the freezing water for a while, just long enough to gain control over his body once more. 

From the shore, the black-haired boy watches him. The amusement he never tries to hide is evident on his face even from twenty feet away. 

_ Issei _ , he has told Takahiro, like his name was his deepest secret. Takahiro has treasured it as such ever since. 

“How proper of you to bathe before lunch,” Issei calls, seated in front of small the fire he has started to fry the fish he has caught. Unlike Takahiro, he seems to be used to living outside the comforts of a village. 

“How improper of you not to join me!” Takahiro calls back. Before Issei, he hasn’t known a single person to simply joke around. Now, after a few afternoons spent together, Takahiro finds joking around might be his thing, too. 

Issei snorts, gestures for Takahiro to come to eat.

Takahiro drags himself back to the shore, where he much like a wet dog sits on the ground and shakes his head. Shivers running down his spine even as the summer sun sits high up the sky, he joins Issei by the fire. Comforted by the warmth, he pulls his t-shirt and shorts off, laying them on the ground to dry off his freezing body. 

Issei doesn’t watch him, not the way he sometimes watches Issei, but his gaze lingers on Takahiro for just a heartbeat too long. It catches on the two strings around Takahiro’s pinkie finger, black and mint, briefly. Before Takahiro can shrink under the attention, however, Issei is staring at the frying fish again. The shadows of the flames dance on his cheeks, the fire dyeing his eyes warm. 

Takahiro shivers once more. He scoots closer to the fire, arms crossing over his chest. 

“That was your record,” Issei says, his voice all smooth and low. “Why did you fall?”

Takahiro still cannot hold chakra in his feet well enough to stand on the water without focusing on it. When he shuts the rest of the world out completely, the river whispers to him as if offering its help, but it’s no use. In the end, Takahiro falls each time.

“The wind,” Takahiro says. “My stupid hair.”

Issei glances up at him through the flames, eyebrows pulled together. “Cut it short then.”

Takahiro nods. 

They eat the fish, filling if not a little bland, and Issei mocks an apology for not carrying spices around with him. Takahiro opens his mouth to retort that Issei could fit one or two in the knife pouch always strapped to his thigh, but the words die on his tongue. 

This topic, though seemingly impossible to avoid, they don’t talk of.

Neither of them wears a forehead protector to the river. Here, they are no soldiers. They leave their duties and their villages behind to live a few hours in a temporary bliss of ignorance, in the fragile illusion of peace. Here, they are only Takahiro and Issei. 

They don’t talk of the war, but Takahiro sees its reflection in Issei’s eyes, as obvious as it is in Hajime’s. They don’t talk of what is expected of them, but Takahiro knows the weight on Issei’s shoulders for he carries it as well. 

They don’t talk of the future, but the terror of his lays in the shadows of the trees. It tugs on the strings tied to Takahiro’s finger and hides in the corners of Issei’s mouth.

By the river, they are as honest in their lies as they possibly can be.

-

Tooru makes everything a competition these days. Takahiro humours him, mostly. They race up the stairs to Hajime’s apartment and they choke on the ramen nearly every night, eager to win a pointless point to add to their imaginary scoreboard. During their morning runs, Hajime scolds them when they get ahead of themselves and leave him behind, only to collapse on the grass a few meters away.

Today, Hajime leads them down a different route. 

They jog towards the village centre instead of further away from it, the morning wind painting their cheeks bright red. Too late does Takahiro realise the strange familiarity of the route. Hajime’s old house comes into full view as they turn a corner, and Takahiro foolishly holds his breath for a reaction. 

Takahiro doesn’t see Hajime’s face, but nothing about Hajime visibly changes. Takahiro shoots Tooru a worried look and receives one in return, almost missing the ball rolling past the open gate and down the street.

Hajime stops in his tracks then. He picks up the ball and holds it at arms distance from his chest. When Takahiro and Tooru come to a stop beside him, however, his expression doesn’t give anything away. The blankness of Hajime’s face is so carefully practised that Takahiro wants to reach out and wipe it off.

“Sorry!” calls a small voice to their side. 

It belongs to a young girl, no older than seven for sure. She runs to them and Takahiro thinks she must trip any moment, for she seems to be stepping on the hem of her long dress. She comes to them in one piece, luckily. 

“Is it yours?” Hajime asks, squatting down to look her in the eye.

The girl smiles at him, all sunshine and missing front tooth. She nods, stretching her arms out. “I kicked it this far!”

“That is very far,” Hajime says, tossing the ball in the air and catching it in one hand. “But be careful not to kick it on the street anymore.”

The girl nods again, takes the ball from Hajime. As she waves her goodbye along with the promise to play further in the garden, Hajime, impossibly, smiles at her. 

Hajime smiles at the little girl and something tugs at Takahiro’s heart, for he doesn’t know that smile although it fits so naturally on Hajime’s face. Judging by Tooru’s bewildered expression, neither does he. 

And what a shame it is, Takahiro thinks as they return to their daily monotony of silence and empty words.

-

“The special unit members don’t use their real names,” Tooru says one cold night, when neither of them can sleep. In preparations for the upcoming autumn, they have pulled out their thick blankets out. Tooru sits wrapped in his, his now always present notebook in hand. “They adopt new ones.”

Hajime nods, obviously listening to Tooru’s voice but not his words. His eyes are long closed where he lies on top of his futon, the only one not to get cold during the night yet. His arms are thrown over his chest, muscles relaxed but swollen from his regular training, and Takahiro finds himself strangely fascinated by them. Jealousy, his mind supplies; the word closest to the truth. 

“Makes sense,” Takahiro says, for he cannot bring himself to leave Tooru, still wide-eyed and still curious, hanging. “They don’t want any ties to lead enemies back to them or their family.”

Tooru nods, but before he can continue reciting the facts he has learnt and written down, Hajime speaks up. 

“It doesn’t really matter,” he says. “Most of them don’t have any family to protect or to return to.” 

Tooru shifts to look at Hajime, crumps of chips falling off his chest onto the floor. Hajime opens his eyes to look back that exact moment. They stare at each other long enough for Takahiro to realise he is missing something. He is missing the context of this conversation; of this argument. He is missing the context of the two of them altogether. 

“Is that-“ Tooru starts, but he cuts himself off before the rest of the question can enlighten Takahiro. He shakes his head and turns back to Takahiro, plastering a smile on his face. 

This smile, Takahiro will come to know as Tooru’s very first mask. 

“What name would you pick for yourself if you could?” Tooru asks him, ever the master of words.

-

“Joining the special unit is the easiest way to ensure you die before you turn twenty,” Tooru tells Takahiro the following morning, when they go shopping together. This time, Tooru lacks his usual excitement to be sharing his knowledge, his eyes cold.

-

Takahiro cannot shake Tooru’s words off even a week later, when he’s sitting in the middle of Hajime’s kitchen. Cut off hair lands on his shoulders and in his lap, piles on the floor under him, but Takahiro barely registers Hajime’s movement and the sound of scissors. 

Hajime has asked Takahiro how much to cut only once, and he hasn’t spoken since. Takahiro has never cared for his hair, for it has never curled nicely like Tooru’s or stayed put as Hajime’s. Currently, his hair presents nothing but a distraction he can’t afford. _Short_ , he has told Hajime. 

Hajime is methodical, in a different way than Tooru. Takahiro fails to find the exact difference, but it is there, somewhere. The reason the two of them work so well together is that they complement each other, a perfect match if Takahiro has ever known such a thing. 

The possibility of a disagreement between them leaves Takahiro uneasy. 

“What do you think of the special unit, really?” Takahiro asks, his voice all sorts of strangled. He has never been good at talking to Hajime, especially without Tooru around. 

Hajime cuts a big chunk of hair right above Takahiro’s left ear. He steps back and crosses his arms over his chest, his gaze hard when it finds Takahiro’s. It isn't judging, not really, but it feels like cold water poured over Takahiro’s head nevertheless. 

“What do you think, really?” Hajime asks back. “About all of this.”

This could mean war. It could mean living together. It could mean whatever is between him and Tooru. It could mean simply the special unit. Hajime only ever speaks when it matters.

Takahiro shrinks into himself, the back of his neck itchy from the stray hair sticking to his sweaty skin. It has been months since he has last seen his parents. It has been just as long since he has last heard of them. It has been a year since the village has last deemed him useful. It has been a year since his teammates, only kids, have – 

It has been a lifetime since anything Takahiro said or did has mattered.

“I think we have changed,” Takahiro says at last. It is the most he can admit about any of this without tearing the wound of his heart open and bleeding out on the floor of Hajime’s apartment. 

Hajime doesn’t reply. Instead, he opts to get back to his task, as if he has overheard Takahiro’s confession. It feels like hours later when he says,

“We have grown up.”

Takahiro nods, but he doesn’t think they are there quite yet. 

-

There’s still a chance for them not to become like adults.

-

When the autumn arrives in its full force, the trees shaking off their leaves and the skies crying more often than not, Takahiro finds himself sitting by the window to watch the world slowly wither away. 

The days he comes to the river, the days the weather allows him the escape, he is alone. In fear of falling in the freezing water, Takahiro only takes a step or two from the shore. The water underneath him lures him to come further, promises to hold him without embracing him, but he doesn’t give in to the temptation. 

By the time the first, rare, snow falls on his shoulders, he can walk on the surface of the river. The task still requires his full attention and an extreme amount of will power, but it is progress. As the snow catches on his eyelashes and bites his skin, he thinks of Issei and the ease of his steps. 

Were Issei to see him now, he would announce the new record, congratulate Takahiro for his achievements. But Issei hasn’t come to the river in months, and he isn't there to see Takahiro reach the other side of the river.

-

The first time Takahiro notices the change in Tooru and Hajime’s relationship is in the middle of the winter.

Takahiro is sitting on the floor in the living room, cover draped over his shoulders as he stuffs himself with instant ramen, when the door of the apartment flies open. Tooru’s and Hajime’s voices spill in the small space of the entrance, echoing down to the living room. For a moment, Takahiro believes they have forgotten about him. Then he decides they simply don’t care if he overhears.

“I just want you to reconsider this,” Tooru says, sounding even more tired than he did that one early morning on the balcony. “If not because of yourself, then-“

The next thing Takahiro hears is the slamming of the door. 

Tooru comes to the living room alone, his expression twisted so bad Takahiro doesn’t bother with greetings. He sinks on the floor next to Takahiro and tugs his uniform off, piece by piece until he sits half-naked in the cold apartment. 

It is Takahiro who drags him to the bathroom and forces him to bathe, to dress, to eat. He cannot force Tooru to sleep, however, and so they lie awake until the sunshine finds its way through the blinds of the windows.

-

On the coldest of the days, Takahiro accompanies Tooru to the library. They sit by the table in the corner of the room, surrounded by the overflowing bookshelves and dust, and read in silence.

Takahiro allows himself the nostalgia of reviving the old conspiracy theory of the secret all adults must share. He reads a thick book about the village’s history one day and the records of the villagers the next, breaking the library’s rules by snacking on potato chips the whole time. He doesn’t take notes like Tooru does, for he is no longer a student. Even back then, back in the academy, Takahiro wasn’t one to write what their teacher told them down.

Today, he pulls out a fragile, yellowed folder from the shelf in the adult section. Years ago, the librarians tailed Tooru around to make sure he only read what a child was allowed to. They don’t seem to care anymore. The old man on duty doesn’t even lift his gaze when Takahiro strides past him.

Kicking his shoes off, Takahiro settles in his seat across from Tooru. He has only brought three bags of chips this morning, ad one of them is already gone. Tooru scolds him for sneaking the chips in every time, but he reaches into the bag as often as Takahiro does. The crumbs on his lap, stuck in the corner of his mouth, give him away when he tries to deny it.

“What is it today?” Tooru asks, looking up from his messy notes. The notebook of his seems to have only a few empty pages left.

Takahiro holds the folder up for Tooru to see the faded-out stamp. “Top secret stuff.”

“It wouldn’t be easily accessible in the library if it truly was top-secret.”

“Who said it was easily accessible?”

Tooru shoots him a funny look. “You got it.”

Takahiro shrugs, stuffs his mouth with the chips. “It was on the very top shelf though,” he argues, mouth half-full.

“Did you have to pull a chair to reach?”

“Bastard,” Takahiro huffs, swallows. “You know I did.”

Tooru chuckles, blowing hair out of his face. It curls around his ears, darker than it used to be when they were kids. At least a strand or two always stick up from his head, and Takahiro enjoys teasing Tooru about those. Cowlicks, Hajime calls them.

“It was in the adult section, and that is not easily accessible,” Takahiro says. “It probably isn't a top-secret anymore, but it used to be, a long time ago.”

Tooru hums, shuts his notebook closed. “Adult section,” he repeats, eyebrows pulled in a thought. “Hajime always makes this weird face when I tell him we went to the adult section.”

“He does,” Takahiro agrees. The expression Tooru means is one of both horror and embarrassment, strange on Hajime’s normally stoic face. “Wanna find out why?”

“Is that even a question.”

They leave their things behind, for even if someone came, no one would steal in a library. They wander through the maze of bookshelves until they come to the adult section, which is really only three bookshelves pushed against the wall, separated from the rest of the maze. 

Everything there is mismatched, lacking any system of organization. Folders and loose files are squeezed in between books and magazines, old newspapers stuffed in the boxes at the very bottom. They aren’t even divided by years, as if someone was in too much of a hurry to sort them out. The librarians, however, never seems to be in a hurry. They don’t seem to have anything to do most of the time. 

Tooru clicks his tongue, running his finger through the dust collecting on the wooden surface. 

“You start up, I start down and we meet in the middle,” Takahiro tells him, already dropping on the floor. 

Tooru mutters something under his breath but he stands on his tip-toes, reaching for the first few books on the top shelf. While flipping through them, one falls apart in his hands. Tooru hurriedly pushes it back, throwing a worried glance behind him. When he realises the librarian cannot see them from his desk by the entrance, he sighs and returns to his task.

It is Takahiro who finds it first. 

The magazine looks like any other at the very first, brief glance, a bunch of colourful pictures on thin paper. Only when Tooru turns to him, eyes widening as he gapes at the magazine in Takahiro’s hand, does Takahiro take a proper look as well.

“Wow,” Takahiro breathes out, at loss. The more he looks, the harder it is to look away, and yet it isn't quite excitement or curiosity rushing blood into his ears. “Is this it?”

“It must be,” Tooru says, dropping on the floor next to Takahiro. He grabs the magazine and holds it at armlength to study it, brows furrowed. The almost naked lady stares back at them. “Do you think Hajime comes to look at this?”

Somehow, Takahiro finds it hard to believe. Then again, he is the last person to take any guesses about Hajime. He tells Tooru that much. 

Tooru hums. He overly dramatically fans himself, nonsense prayers slipping past his lips. Takahiro slaps his shoulder, and Tooru rolls his eyes. “Fine, fine,” he mutters. “I’m opening it.”

They flip through the pages together, humming every now and then, though Takahiro catches Tooru’s gaze catching everywhere except on the pictures. Takahiro himself scrunches his nose up, not sure what the correct reaction to the magazine should be. At last, Tooru shuts the magazine closed, stuffing it into one of the newspapers boxes. 

Takahiro pokes the corner sticking out, all bent and worn-out, and a giggle escapes him. One after another, and before he knows it, he’s full-on laughing on the library floor. 

Tooru huffs. He slaps a hand over Takahiro’s hand, but he is smiling, wide, wider, and then he’s laughing as well.

-

Only a few days before his fifteenth birthday, Takahiro steps into Hajime’s kitchen, sleep still tugging at his heavy eyelids, and freezes in place. Tooru and Hajime sit by the table with their team leader, his pristine uniform a jarring contrast next to their perspective pyjamas. 

Takahiro has seen the man around only a few times, never long enough to even catch his name. He looks barely older than Hajime, except for the deep wrinkle set in his forehead. Tooru and Hajime don’t speak of him often, but that is to spare Takahiro’s feelings, mostly. 

At Takahiro’s silent yet obvious entrance, their voices die out. The adult looks up from his students and stares Takahiro down with something akin pity behind his eyes. Takahiro notices it only because just like the adults are trained to conceal everything, Takahiro has been training to see things hidden. 

Although the rules of politeness command Takahiro to lower his gaze first, he does not.

“Is this him?” the adult asks.

“Yes,” Tooru replies. His voice is rough around the edges, but Takahiro doubts the remains of sleep are at fault in this case.

Adults never come bearing good news, after all. They don’t talk if there isn't a need, and especially with kids.

“Then introductions are in order,” the adult says. 

He stands up and crosses the distance between the kitchen table and Takahiro. His legs are ridiculously long, his movements as smooth as cat’s. They hint at natural talent as much as years of training, though the man cannot be older than twenty. Takahiro guesses he started attending the academy much younger than they did.

“Shirai Kouta, jonin,” he says. “Welcome to team fourteen, Takahiro.”

Takahiro gapes at him, then at Tooru and Hajime. When no one offers him any further explanation, he bows his head, fists clenched behind his back. 

“Pleased to meet you,” Takahiro says, the lie slipping past his lips with unexpected ease. “I am in your care.”

“I hear you are a mid-range one,” Kouta says. “I think you will fit right in.”

Takahiro nods. 

The three of them wouldn’t make a good team, Tooru has told Takahiro once. Back then, the words stung like a cut and salt in it. Back then, Takahiro wanted nothing but to follow his friends. Now, given the chance, Takahiro finds himself filled with dismay. 

What once was a hopeless wish now feels like a nightmare come true. A betrayal. 

Only after the adult’s departure does Takahiro join Tooru and Hajime by the table. 

Their pyjamas seem to match, blue and white, white and blue. Takahiro doesn’t know how he hasn’t noticed sooner. It’s always been the two of them, Tooru and Hajime, Hajime and Tooru.

Takahiro and the river. Takahiro and –

“What happened?” Takahiro asks, to start at the beginning. To give himself time to think. “How- How can I be on your team?”

Tooru rubs the back of his neck. 

The skin of Takahiro’s right pinkie finger, the exact spot under the two strings, itches so bad he thinks of tearing the skin off. He settles for scratching it under the skin burns under his nails.

“Our teammate,” Tooru says at last. “He and his family left the village last week.”

Takahiro sucks in a deep breath, runs his finger over the irritated skin, the old strings. The academy doesn’t teach such things and the adults avoid telling the truth, but Takahiro knows what happens to those who betray the village. He has heard of relatives never showing up at family gatherings again, of teachers at the academy being replaced as if they never existed. 

No one leaves the village, for even such thought equals betrayal. 

“What will happen to them?” Takahiro asks. He doesn’t recognize the coldness of his voice then. Not yet. 

Tooru squirms in his seat, always the one to answer. His face doesn’t give the weight of that particular burden away, but Takahiro can imagine it clearly. Takahiro has laid it there himself, when they were still kids and Tooru didn’t know better than to let him.

“The special unit will search for them,” Tooru says, ever so careful with his words. 

What he means, unknowingly or knowingly, is simple. 

The special unit will hunt them down.

-

When the flowers begin to bloom once more, Takahiro is fifteen and bursting at the seams. His body feels too small, too fragile, to contain all that is his mind, his dreams and ideas. 

Takahiro sits by the window and watches Tooru flip through his completed notebook. He is searching for something he has written down ages ago, it seems, but the pages are overflowing with his notes. 

Were Takahiro to put his thoughts down the same way Tooru does, the pages would probably be nothing but a black splotch of ink. Were Takahiro to focus on solely one thing, just as Tooru does, his head would explode, river water flooding the small space of Hajime’s apartment. Takahiro wonders if they, Tooru and Hajime, would drown in it with him. 

Tooru finds whatever he has been searching for. Where Takahiro has expected a pleased smile to appear, worry tugs at the corners of his mouth instead. He runs his finger across the page once and then shuts the notebook closed, the force behind the movement enough to startle Takahiro. 

Only then does Tooru notice Takahiro by the window. He smiles, all false apology, indifference settling over his features. 

Takahiro opens his mouth, but no words find their way out. And so he smiles back, all false understanding. 

The dread of the unknown in him continues to grow, faster than he himself is able to. 

-

Takahiro opens the box he has sealed a year ago, and his stomach turns. 

His uniform sits there untouched, cleaned by his mother when she was still home. When his home still was his own. Takahiro unfolds the clothes and lays them out on the bathroom floor, hidden behind a locked door while Tooru and Hajime share dinner. 

The dread growing in him, once only seed but now a plant of thorns and no blossoms, scratches his throat raw. 

Takahiro is expected to wear black and mint again. He is expected to accompany Tooru and Hajime and Kouta beyond the village’s walls, where they are not people but moving targets. He is expected to fight, to defend, to sacrifice.

To put the village first always.

He is expected to do all of that, soon.

-

A bird comes to sit behind their window one of these days. It is an eagle, but much smaller than the ones Takahiro is used to seeing. It sits there and then flies away, only to come back again. Takahiro opens the window before they go to sleep, but the bird doesn’t startle. It just sits there, free to do as it pleases but choosing to watch them. 

-

They depart at dawn. 

Tooru and Hajime have grown into their uniforms over the winter, filling them out better than they did in autumn. Tooru still wraps his forehead protector around his bicep, but it doesn’t slip down anymore. Hajime rolls his sleeves up for the fabric is too tight around his forearms. 

Takahiro drowns in his uniform as he did the first time he wore it. 

Oh, but how lucky he is, to wear black and mint again. How lucky he is to wake up in the morning, to experience another day. How lucky he is to live with the ghosts instead of haunting others with them.

Much like Takahiro’s first one, this mission sounds minor, harmless. They are to check on the villagers living up north, unprotected and troubled by bandits. Kouta doesn’t tell them anything else than that, but neither Tooru nor Hajime questions him. 

Takahiro tries to trust him, he does, but the uniform feels like acid on his skin, the knives in his pouch digging into his leg. His left hand is too light, unbalanced. His right one is tugging him down, under the ground, down to the depths of hell.

A few hours into their journey, Tooru notices. He nods at Hajime and waits for Takahiro, distancing them from Kouta in the lead of their party. He eyes Takahiro’s right hand like never has before, and Takahiro too late realises he has been afraid to. But Tooru is always pushing himself to overcome his own faults. 

“You could have said no,” Tooru says. Not even he sounds convinced, however. His words might as well be the air.

Takahiro huffs. He doesn’t grace Tooru with an answer. Refusing the orders means betrayal, and those who betray the village don’t get to greet their parents if they return from the war.

But Tooru lives in the world of ‘when’ instead of ‘if’, still foolish enough to believe the adults. 

-

As a team, they complete one mission after another. They run errands and scare off bandits, help out on farms and chase after runaway children. 

Putting the uniform on never gets easier; Takahiro’s skin becomes numb to bear it instead. 

-

Takahiro ducks just in time to miss the knife aimed at his head.

It flies by his left ear and digs deep in the tree behind him, but Takahiro finds himself grinning despite the attack. He pulls the knife out of the tree trunk. Unlike the knives he is used to wearing, meant for close combat, this knife has been designed to be thrown.

Issei seems to have a talent for it.

In the long months Takahiro hasn’t seen him, he has grown an inch or two taller, his cheeks hollowed out though Takahiro remembers them round. What hasn’t changed is the small smile, private and genuine, that Issei offers Takahiro once Takahiro steps out of the shadows of the forest. 

“You come here often?” Issei calls, shoving his hands into the pockets of his shorts. 

“I try to,” Takahiro replies, truthfully if not regretfully.

Joining team fourteen meant sacrificing the precious days by the river, but even three months later, Takahiro cannot bring himself to ask to be released of his duties. He owes this much to Tooru and Hajime, to the families of his teammates. He cannot possibly ask to quit now, when his and Tooru’s parents are off in the war and Hajime’s rest under the ground. He cannot possibly ask to quit when the two strings still cut into his skin.

Besides, the higher-ups would ask for his reason. He would lie, the way adults have shown him, and perhaps they would even believe him. But then, Tooru would ask the same thing, and Takahiro could fool anyone but him. The only thing that escapes Tooru’s attention is the way Hajime looks at him, sometimes.

Takahiro tightens his grip on Issei’s knife. He comes up close enough to step on Issei’s toes, to push the blade against Issei’s throat if he wanted to. Takahiro only wishes to share the open air. 

Issei watches him, catching whatever Takahiro’s face gives away, with a familiar hint of amusement tugging at his lips. Wariness and fear aren’t the same thing, he has taught Takahiro. Issei, though naturally wary, has never been afraid of Takahiro. He doesn’t as much as flinch at the proximity. 

“Did you get any better over the winter?” Takahiro asks.

The summer sun reminds him that his hair has grown too long again. It tickles the back of his neck, damp with sweat, and Takahiro tries to ignore it for a little longer. The water calls to him, eager to pull him down under, to cool him down. If Takahiro didn’t know any better, he would think the river played games with him.

“Did you?” Issei asks in return, one thick eyebrow raised. It creates a single wrinkle on his forehead.

Takahiro raises the knife, points it at Issei’s face. What he gets in a response is a huff of breath, mocking and amused all the same. Takahiro presses the knife against Issei’s nose. Issei leans forward, against the blade, just barely. It’s a challenge Takahiro won’t back out of. 

“Feel free to find out.”

They jump back simultaneously, as if they shared one heartbeat. In the second Takahiro needs to regain his footing, Issei retrieves another knife from his pouch. He throws it only once Takahiro’s attention is on him, and Takahiro ducks. This time, the warm blade brushes his shoulder. It doesn’t cut the fabric of his t-shirt, but it sends shivers down his spine as if it did.

Issei has the audacity to grin. He drops into a squat, one leg stretched out in front of him, and beckons Takahiro to attack next. 

Takahiro exchanges Issei’s throwing knife for one of his own, familiar in his hand. He has never been that good with them, but Tooru and Hajime didn’t train with him for nothing. In his arrogance, Issei has given Takahiro an opening, and though it might be an obvious one, Takahiro doesn’t plan on missing it. 

He throws the knife. Its trajectory is wobbly, for the blade is unbalanced, but it does its job as a mere distraction. While Issei tracks the knife’s movement, Takahiro forms the hand seal. When Issei’s fingers clasp around the knife’s handle, his grin triumphant, a small cloud full of water is already floating above his head.

Takahiro raises two fingers to his forehead in a salutation, and lets the cloud burst like a balloon. 

Issei curses as the sudden shower hits him, the freezing river water falling over his head and shoulders. It washes all his amusement and arrogance away, leaving him to gape at Takahiro. He looks lovely still. Sticking Takahiro’s knife into the ground, he stands, pealing his soaked-through t-shirt off his chest. A long white scar runs down his stomach, but Takahiro knows better than to ask. 

That doesn’t stop Takahiro from staring. His ears burn, worse than that time in the library with Tooru.

“When did you learn that?” Issei asks, uncaring of Takahiro’s eyes on his bare skin.

At his words, Takahiro snaps out of his trance, meeting Issei’s curious gaze with a grin. “We haven’t seen each other in almost a year,” he reminds Issei. “I had time.”

Issei nods. “You win this round,” he says. His hair sticks to his forehead, curling at the ends. 

Takahiro cannot tear his eyes off him then. He tries to imagine this boy in his life, walking by his side the same way Tooru and Hajime do, but he cannot, for Issei will always belong to the river on a hot summer day. He cannot imagine Issei, wild and yet peaceful at heart, caged between the high walls of the village. 

He cannot imagine baring the ugliness living deep in his chest, rotten to the core, for Issei’s eyes to see.

Each day they spend here, not talking about where they got their knives or where they have learnt to use jutsu, they are simply buying themselves time. And Takahiro is desperate for it, he realises. He needs more time, just a little more, before he sacrifices himself for what he doesn’t believe in.

“I win,” Takahiro says at last.

Issei shoots him a weird look. Takahiro shoots him a bright smile in return. 

None of it matters now.

Issei jumps in the river, diving under the surface. Takahiro shrugs off his t-shirt and follows him, for once welcoming the coolness of the water against his burning skin. Issei resurfaces, splashes water in Takahiro’s face. He stares Takahiro down, and Takahiro takes it as a cue to scold his expression into something playful.

“Who would have thought you were a sore loser,” Takahiro ponders, kicking Issei’s shin. The water seems to be working with him instead of against him.

Issei kicks him back, the attack lacking any strength behind it. 

It is when they are done play-fighting and are just floating on their backs, letting the sun to warm them up, when the water whispers to Takahiro.

‘ _Drown him now_ ,’ it says. Takahiro startles, losing his balance, but the water holds him up. 

‘ _Drown him while you can_ ,’ the river says.

-

_ ‘Drown him before he drowns you.’ _

-

The apartment is silent when Takahiro opens the front door, still shaken by the whispers in his ear. Never before has the water’s humming sounder more like real words, meant for him only. Never before has the water felt so alive it has that afternoon.

Takahiro kicks his shoes off and lays them next to Tooru’s in a neat line. He steps further inside, scratching his knee. His shorts have long dried, but his skin is itchy, as if the river left its fingerprints, cursed with hate, pressed on his body.

In the living room, Takahiro comes to a stop. Tooru and Hajime sit on the floor, at first glance unmoving. The light of the setting sun, orange blending into a pink, catches in their hair, casting shadows over their faces. The air is too still, to tense. Anxiety rising up his throat, Takahiro hurries over, dropping on his knees before them.

Tooru lifts his head, and Takahiro’s breath hitches at the tears streaming down his flushed cheeks.

“What-“

“The war,” Tooru chokes out.

Takahiro reaches out, stops himself. His hands hover above Tooru’s shaking shoulders. Tooru has always felt too fragile to touch, too strangely wonderful to be anything but a dream that dissolves in the thin air if it comes in the contact with reality.

Tooru hiccups, and Hajime slaps his back.

Takahiro turns to him then, something akin fury deep in his gut, but up close, Hajime’s expression is free of any worry. No, he looks at peace, despite Tooru’s breakdown.

“The war,” Tooru tries again. His fingers come up to Takahiro’s t-shirt, tugging him closer. “The war is over.”

A moment of silence passes.

“What?” Takahiro asks, his voice not his own.

He couldn’t have heard right. The war has been stretching out for over two decades now. The war, if anything at all, has been a constant in their lives. Neither of them knows what life is like without a war. It cannot just be over.

“They are coming home, Hiro,” Tooru says, breathless. “They are coming home.”

They are coming home. The war is over.

-

Behind them, the small eagle sits at the window sill.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! If you are a Naruto fan, then you might be (should be, honestly) able to tell which characters are my favourite based on the backstories this fic was inspired by! In this and the first chapter, they are at least four hehe (and more to come)
> 
> Here are some hints:  
> -friends coming together by a river  
> -child losing his teammates and being traumatized  
> -child not being able to do jutsu but not giving up  
> -child having a close relationship with an element 
> 
> The rest are spoilers for now, so expect more the next time.
> 
> If you are not a Naruto fan, I still hope you enjoyed this!

**Author's Note:**

> So this was supposed to be a silly little thing of max 5k, but then it got out of hand .. I haven't written for the HQ fandom in a long while, but I keep getting kudos on my old works daily, and so I hope the fandom will have me back with whatever this is
> 
> Feedback, criticism and ideas are always welcome, as I write to please not only myself but others as well! Also, please let me know if you think I should tag something I haven't


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